During the course of our relationship I have “forced” Anna to watch several movies that she had absolutely no interest in, thus resulting in several treacherous crossroads for us to navigate. And even with huge successes like The Descent, Fight Club and American Movie, it has still proven to be quite the struggle to convince her that my love of a particular film might actually translate into being worth her time to view it. Recently such an event happened involving Slither.

Now when Slither was released about 2 years ago we had been dating for several months and my birthday was fast approaching. I had gotten some passes to an advance screening of the film that was to occur on my birthday. Now, with a March birthday it can be a bit of a struggle to find even a competent birthday film, so I was quite excited at the prospect of watching a halfway decent horror comedy as my own personal birthday present to myself.
(more…)

I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!
(more…)